HOW TO INCREASE TWITTER REACH

#1: Follow Twitter Basics

Before you do anything else, be sure you understand a few Twitter fundamentals. You can increase your tweet exposure with just a few tweaks:

·Don’t start tweets with @username. Starting a tweet with @username restricts its visibility to only you, the person you’re tweeting and any mutual followers. Your reach is automatically cut short!

Don’t use more than three hashtags in any one tweet. Too many hashtags in a tweet makes it look spammy and reduces your tweet’s shareability.

Don’t over-tweet about yourself or your products. The 80/20 rule applies onall social platforms. The80/20 rulemeans you spend 80% of the time interacting with and promoting others and 20% of the time promoting yourself and your products.

Provide as much value as you can. Listen to your followers and the people you follow. What are their pain points? How can you solve those? When you share relevant, interesting tweets (without over-promoting), people see you as an expert and may recommend you to others as an important resource.

#2: Promote Your Twitter Profile Everywhere

Use your other social profiles to tell people about your Twitter handle.Add your Twitter username to the About or Contact sections of Facebook, Google+, LinkedInand any other social profiles you use.

On your website or blog, be sure youhave social sharing buttonsto make it easy for readers to tell others about your content.

Plugins make it simple toinstall and customize sharing optionsandexpand your reach by addingvia @yourusernameevery time someone tweets content from your site. This simple customization gets your Twitter handle in front of hundreds of users you may not have reached otherwise.

#3: Cross-Promote Your Giveaways

Giveaways always drive more traffic, visibility and engagement.Take advantage of that by creating a Q&A giveaway that requires entrants to give their answers by tagging you on Twitterand using a specific hashtag.

Thehashtag is easy to trackand ensures you don’t miss part of the conversation. Requiring users to tag your @usernameensures a wider audience sees your handle. Be sure to engage with any users who respond or use the hashtag—it’s just good etiquetteandyou’ll reach even more people.

When you’re ready to promote your giveaway,post the question to all of your social accounts. Start with the platform that has the most engagement, then share across your other social profiles. Don’t forget to share on Twitter!

#4: Interact With Niche Influencers

Whether you’re offline or online, networking is a tried-and-true method for extending your reach. If you haven’t startednetworking on Twitter, now’s the time.

If you’re truly listening on Twitter, you’ll be able to tell who the influencers are in your niche—those are the people with whom you want to establish a relationship. Remember, the influencers don’t have to be national in scope, they can be important locals as well (e.g., the newspaper editor or local newscasters).

Start a Twitter conversation with a few of the influencers in your nicheandadd as muchvalue to the conversationas you can. The more interesting you are, the more likely it is that an influencer will respond to or spread your message.

The Fort Collins, CO band@FierceBadhas a modest 683 followers, but has established a relationship with the amazingly popular @newbelgium (New Belgium Brewing, also in Fort Collins). When Fierce Bad released a new video, New Belgium Brewing tweeted it out to their 187,500 fans—quite a bit bigger audience.

#5: Find Allies in an Online Community

If you think you’re alone in trying to build Twitter exposure, think again! There are lots of communities for people just like you who want to network.

These communities are generally built around niches, so it’s easy tofind one where members share your interests. Shared interests mean it’s easier to find good content to send out to your followers (remember the 80/20 rule!). Since sharing is usually (but not always) reciprocal, you’re benefitting too.

Most online communities are free to join and welcome new members with open arms. Here are10 communities you can join to increase your exposure on Twitter:

You’ll find that many serious marketers have a strong presence in multiple online communities like these because they realize the overall value. Joining the same communities allows you toconnect with those influencers (and expand your Twitter reach) on a larger scale.

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Twitter can be used not only for building your audience, but also for expanding your knowledge and interacting with fellow industry members. Here are 7 practices I find are necessary to build a larger Twitter following.

1. Build your profileTwitter gives you the option to edit your profile. Picture, name, location, website, and a 160 character bio are all bits about yourself you can include on your page. It’s important to use your real picture, name, and location. People won’t follow you if they don’t know who you are! Adding your real location gives users the option of connecting in similar areas. Adding your website or blog obviously connects your twitter to your other endeavors. The 160 character bio gives people a sneak peak into what you stand for. It’s not as big as the ‘About Me’ section on your site so be selective with what you put.

Being witty and creative while maintaining professionalism will draw people in! Give it a try.

2. Use #hashtags

Twitter lets you use hashtags (which are basically words following hashmarks – #) in your tweets as keywords by which people can search for content. Say you write something related to photography that you think is really interesting and relevant. If someone is specifically searching for tweets related to photography, they search for #photography instead of just “photography”. If you want your tweet to pop up when people search for a specific term or idea, make it a hashtag!

Following interesting content with hashtags makes it easier to find you in a sea of millions of tweets!

3. Connect, connect, and connect some more

You blog, you tweet, you update your website. Well, connecting all of the different platforms you use will increase your following. Someone who was reading your blog will be able to find you through it on twitter and follow you. Twitter offers various buttons and widgets that you can put on your website. You can even link your twitter to other social media platforms that you may use. Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, Youtube, etc.

The more you connect your twitter to the rest of your online presence, the more people will be able to find you and follow you!

4. Interact with others

First and foremost, Twitter is a real-time information network. Users ask and answer questions, comment, and share knowledge. Listening in and learning from what others are saying is a great way to start using and getting a feel for Twitter. But taking the plunge into interacting with others will really build your presence on the network and gain followers. The basic ways to interact with other tweeps are by using @mentions, retweets (RT), and replies.

Type the symbol @ before another user’s handle to directly reach that person (example @esveegroup). They can hit ‘reply’ and answer you back, creating a mini conversation that pops up once you hit the tweet itself. You can also RT a tweet that you find really interesting.

Having a good balance between these interactions and sharing your own handy information makes you a well-rounded tweep! You will be loads more searchable and accessible for others to find you.

5. Primetime Tweeting

You will want to be strategic in the timing of your tweets to get the optimal potential for views. The prime time tweeting and viewing hours for businesses will be on weekdays in the late morning to early evening portion of the day, aka work hours! What you don’t want to do is tweet tweet tweet in the middle of the night or weekends. Your posts will be drowned by the time people open up their streams for viewing. Another thing you don’t want to do is tweet 5, 6, 7 times in a row and nothing the rest of the time.

How do we tackle this problem? Sometimes we only have a limited time to devote to twitter and finding what to share. After all, you can’t sit and wait to tweet in the proper intervals. Or you can, but that would be a major waste of time because there are services that let you schedule all of your tweets! My personal favorite is Hootsuite. Create an account (its free!), link your Twitter to it, and schedule away! Post in 10 minutes? Sure. 10 hours? Okay. 10 days? Well, make sure its not old news by then!

The point is, timing your tweets the right way will ensure that others will see what you post, because that’s the whole point of Twitter anyway, isn’t it?

6. Engage your followers

Nobody wants to follow someone boring. Posting interesting and relevant content is obviously necessary, you should be doing it anyway if you want others to follow you. But there are other ways to spice up your Twitter presence too. Contests, polls, surveys, etc are not only engaging to your followers but also informative and useful to you! By setting up something like these, you will draw users in. “Our 100th follower will get 2 free hours of consultation” or offering coupons for existing followers are simple and fun ways to get noticed!

Twitter chats are scheduled conversations held on Twitter to talk about basically anything using an agreed upon #hashtag. Participating in a chat is the next step to really getting the most out of the platform. There is a chat about almost any topic, and if not, you can easily start one up! These chats really connect you to other users who are obviously interested in what you are interested in. You get to learn new things, meet and interact with new people, and gain some followers!